Even as the nation struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, it’s clear that more public health effort needs to be directed at helping expectant mothers understand how much substances they ingest can harm their kids.

This real situation with over-medicated Americans, in this case seniors in nursing homes, is just one more cruelty happening against the aged. It’s also hard to see federal officials issuing faint praise on how regulations slowly — too painfully so — are reducing abuse of potent anti-psychotics in the nation’s care for the old, especially those with dementia.

Although Congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration may not want to stop their relentless assault on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, there may be other reasons to persuade them to do so.

They say the repeal of the requirement that all Americans show they have health coverage when they pay their taxes may “ripple out” to other insurances they carry — meaning that tens of millions of motorists may pay more for auto insurance and businesses could see hikes in workmen’s compensation costs they already struggle to pay.

The Winter Olympic Games and the Super Bowl can offer fans not just exciting sports spectacles but also important health insights and information— everything from the risks of viruses and the value of hand washing to the dangers of head blows and why Americans may be slowly changing their minds about how they feel about violent recreations.

It would be tough to make up this story, much less explain why a recent United Airlines passenger, a performance artist, thought it appropriate to try to fly with her pet peacock (he’s shown in a photo taken by his owner and posted on his public Instagram account). She claimed it was an emotional support animal, protected under disability law, and she said she had purchased a separate seat for the hefty bird.

On the one hand, it provides what many see as an important, needed call to doctors of all kinds to recognize that heart disease among women goes “dangerously under-diagnosed and under-treated,” due in no small part because practitioners still fail to see that women suffer heart attacks in different ways than do many men. They do not, for example, suffer stabbing chest pain, radiating into the arm. Instead, as they experience clogs in tiny veins and arteries, they may feel a constant exhaustion and a discomfort as if they were having their chest squeezed or crushed.

The opioid epidemic has become so pernicious that it can be exhausting to even try to see its expansive harms. But it’s crucial to keep confronting the many ways this lethal scourge affects Americans and their lives, if only to hope that politicians, policy-makers, doctors, hospitals, and many others get off their duffs and do something about it.

It turns out that the substance known generically as loperamide, useful in stopping the runs, happens to be part of the opioid family, an addictive drug class that includes morphine and oxycodone. Drug users have turned now to abusing anti-diarrhea meds, which are sold in high-count packages and at dosages that authorities want reduced.

She was forced to resign after media disclosures that not only had she slow-walked her divestment in a multi-million-dollar portfolio, owned with her husband, of Big Pharma and other health care enterprises, but, even after she joined the CDC, she was caught buying and selling Big Tobacco stocks.

Instead, Larry Nassar — an osteopath who served as an athletics and team caregiver for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University — got away for years with abusing adolescent females put under his sway. He purportedly provided medical services to them, many in exclusive and demanding athletic camps where young participants were cut off from their friends, family, coaches, and personal physicians. He “treated” aspiring Olympians, at all hours of the night and day, alone and without any other adults around, in their bedrooms, on their beds — not in medical offices or athletic training facilities.

He enthusiastically told his patients, many of whom excelled at their sport because of their willingness to please adults and to be coached, that he could deal with their pains and injuries with what he termed pelvic manipulations in which he digitally penetrated them in their private parts. Without medical cause or justification, he conducted repeated and invasive “exams” of girls and young women’s genitals.

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